his violin and piano, nor hear the horrible discords he made upon them, stimulated himself continually by the manual utterance to evolution of the divine harmonies which were lost forever to his bodily ear.
It is mentioned by Bombet, as another advantage which the musician possesses over other artists, that—
“His productions are finished as soon as imagined. Thus Haydn, who abounded in such beautiful ideas, incessantly enjoyed the pleasure of creation. The poet shares this advantage with the composer; but the musician can work faster. A beautiful ode, a beautiful symphony, need only be imagined, to cause, in the mind of the author, that secret admiration, which is the life and soul of artists. But in the studies of the military man, of the architect, the sculptor, the painter, there is not invention enough for them to be fully satisfied with themselves; further labors are necessary, The best planned enterprise may fail in the execution; the best conceived picture may be ill painted; all this leaves in the mind of the inventor an obscurity, a feeling of uncertainty, which renders the pleasure of creation less complete. Haydn, on the contrary, in imagining a symphony, was perfectly happy; there only remained the physical pleasure of hearing it performed, and the moral pleasure of seeing it applauded.”
Plausible as this comparison appears at first; the moment you look at an artist like Michel Angelo, who, by deep studies and intensity of survey, had attained such vigor of conception and surety of hand, that forms sprang forth under his touch as fresh, as original, and as powerful, as on the first days when there was light upon the earth, so that he could not turn his pencil this way or that, but these forms came upon the paper as easily as plants from the soil where the fit seed falls,—at Raphael, who seemed to develop at once in his mind the germ of all possible images, so that shapes flowed from his hand plenteous and facile as drops of water from the open sluice, we see that the presence of the highest genius makes all mediums alike transparent, and that the advantages of one over the other respect only the more or less
